Pop Go the Indians

Holy Trinity by Derek No-Sun Brown

I recently attended the annual American Indian Arts Marketplace at the Autry National Center.  For this event, a giant tent is erected and filled with dozens of American Indian artists. They display works that include jewelry, baskets, clothing, painting, and sculpture.

It is always a great event, and I saw one trend that I especially enjoyed: an increase in popular culture imagery in the work by American Indian artists. You know, Star Wars vehicles running alongside horses. Sitting Bull in a Versace scarf. Pixelated portraits of Navajo people.

Three years ago, when I attended my first Arts Marketplace, I saw just one booth that featured this blend of "traditional" arts with popular culture. This year I saw four. I know that is not a lot, but it is sign of a trend that is evident elsewhere.

War Songs Circa 1986 by Derek No-Sun Brown

For instance, Derek No-Sun Brown was at the Autry show for the first time. In fact, it was the first show ever for the recent graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. I really liked his big canvasses that featured American Indian men in war bonnets and on horseback, in the midst of the Great Plains -- with one man holding a large, silver boombox on his shoulder. [Update: I added the Holy Trinity image after the original posting.]

Derek also had the large portrait of Sitting Bull that I mentioned. In it he wears a Versace scarf and has gold chains hanging below that. Chief Blinging Bull?

The image I have included here is from Derek's website. It is titled "War Songs Circa 1986." He had it with him at the Autry. (Out of respect for the artists, I did not take pictures of their work in the booths.)

Dallin Maybee was at the Autry too. His work featured Star Wars imagery, as well as vintage automobiles, and cartoon characters. One of his paintings blended a popular genre in American Indian art -- ledger art -- with some updating. Contemporary ledger art revives the style of drawings made by American Indians in the 1800s on ledgers (old accounting books). Those images continued a Plains tradition of drawing and painting on animal hides. Artists today take the same kind of paper and create images that build upon that rich tradition.

Image provided by Dallin Maybee.

Maybee's booth featured ledger art that included the usual male warriors riding dashing ponies, but among the horses were cars and motorcycles. And in one work, the procession was being led by an AT-AT, those four-legged assault vehicles used by the Imperial forces against the Rebels in The Empire Strikes Back. Oh, and Spongebob is in the procession too. Riding a sea horse, of course.

Dallin Maybee playing his Spongebob drum.

Speaking of Spongebob, Dallin also had a hand drum he had made in the shape of that aquatic hero. The arms detach to become the sticks for beating. (You can see a YouTube video of him playing it.)

Jeremy Singer was the first artist at the Autry show I saw mixing popular culture imagery with his paintings of more widely expected American Indian themes. (I bought one of his paintings that year; it is a geometric study that blends shapes commonly found in native weaving with the graphics of the old Atari Asteroids game.) This year his work concentrated on portraits made in triplicate, mimicking the way 3D images appear when not viewed through 3D glasses.

I have included the poster of a recent show of Singer's to illustrate the appearance of his portraits.  You can see examples his work at his website.

These artists all stated that the popular culture images and themes were extensions of their lives. The artists had grown up with these images, or their children loved these characters, and they had been important influences. Brown, Maybee, and Singer are part of a growing trend in contemporary American Indian art that combines visual vocabularies from two fields generally thought of as distinct from each other (at least in the art marketplace and mainstream art criticism). They combine the signs and symbols from American Indian representational traditions that predate contact with Europeans with signs and symbols that came after that contact. These contemporary signs and symbols almost always originate in the last few decades, when these artists were children or were raising their children.

An entire exhibition of such works was created in Santa Fe in 2012 -- Low-Rez: The Native American Lowbrow. (FYI: "rez" is slang for reservation.)  You can see an excellent blog entry about this show here. Jeremy Singer was an artist featured in it.

The Heart of the Indian by America Meredith

One of my favorite images from the Low-Rez show is by America Meredith. The Heart of the Indian features a drawing from the 1580s, a PowerPuff Girl (I believe this is Buttercup), and, according to Meredith, a Cherokee pottery stamp design.

The words on the painting are from James Mooney, a white anthropologist famous for writing about his experiences in American Indian communities in the late 1800s; this line is from Historical Sketch of the Cherokee. It reads: "There is change indeed in dress and outward seeming, but the heart of the Indian is still his own."

On the one hand, one could say the drawing from the 1580s represents the appearance of the American Indian at the time of first contact and Buttercup represents the way a 21st century American Indian might imagine herself as an empowered female.  The Cherokee stamp between the two figures could suggest the native bond that links the two figures, and the Mooney quote could emphasize the similarities between the two images rather than their differences.

On the other hand, one could see the 1580 image (by John White) as among the first images that started a long history of misperception of American Indians by Europeans and misrepresentations of them.  The image is called "The Conjurer," but here the figure looks to be fleeing rather than conjuring -- perhaps he is running away from Buttercup. (She does look angry, doesn't she?) This reading would suggest that Buttercup, despite not being readily recognizable as "Indian," has been chosen by an Indian artist for her self-representation, and it is chasing away the image that does deploy the more easily understood signs of "Indian" but which is a representation created by someone else. In this sense the native artist is claiming her own agency.

Regardless of which reading one chooses, the Mooney quote suggests that the image speaks from an American Indian experience no matter the surface appearance of its imagery. Simon Ortiz, a distinguished poet from the Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico, had something to say about such things.  In his essay, "Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism," Ortiz writes that some people feel that speaking and writing in English, that participating in cultural practices that originated outside of their native communities, are somehow less Indian. He denies this. American Indian artists have not been forced to "forsake their native selves." Ortiz claims "it is entirely possible for a people retain and maintain their lives through the use of any language." I would add: Whether that language is verbal or visual.

No Locks by April Holder

An artist from the Low-Rez show, April Holder, said it well: "If Native Americans live in two worlds, then Native Pop is the bridge between those two worlds. Native pop art is the combination of the essence of traditional identity and the embrace of the ever changing world around us."

Dances with Cubism

Spirit Warrior on Horse

I am tempted to not write anything about Anishinaabe artist Frank Big Bear. His images are dense enough, it seems. My attempt to describe, explain, or somehow narrate would just get lost -- and justly so -- in the energy and color of his work.

But this is my blog, so I should write at least a few things. His images interest me in their own right, but they interest me also because they probably go against what many people assume American Indian art to be. If I told most people that I was going to show them a painting called Spirit Warrior on Horse, I do not think they would expect a work of Indigenous Cubism.
 
The images of American Indians that most people in the United States are familiar with derive from three sources: the photography of Edward Curtis, the paintings and drawings of George Catlin, and Hollywood movies.

Bull Tongue

Curtis was not an American Indian, but he left a legacy of famous and influential images of American Indians. His stoic faces, sometimes proud, sometimes tragic, still dominate the popular visual imaginings of American Indians. They even influenced the work of American Indian artists, and Curtis's photographs can be found in the homes of American Indians today. 

Some native artists have followed Curtis's lead, while others have challenged his notions of the stone-faced Indian, trapped in the past. For instance, look at this portrait by Curtis of a man named Bull Tongue.

Contrast this with a portrait by Big Bear. [In an earlier version I incorrectly described the painting as a self-portrait.]

Autumn's Wind

Both images feature an American Indian man staring at the viewer. Neither smiles. Bull Tongue appears as he might have before the white Americans ever moved into his neighborhood. (Richard Throssel photographed him in his day-to-day clothes.) Big Bear represents his subject (Autumn, one of his daughters) with some similar ready-made signs of Indian-ness: the long hair, the bear-claw necklace, the piercing eyes. A question mark rises from her head, and one eyebrow is raised. Is she asking us, "What are you looking at?" Is she asking herself, "What am I doing here?"

Despite some superficial resemblance to Curtis's portraits, Big Bear's painting is dominated by his Cubist tendencies. Whereas Curtis's images can be considered elegiac, Big Bear's are energetic.  Every inch of canvas is filled with vivid colors, dynamic patterns, and images of birds, animals, and landscape. The face may be stoic, but the canvas, if it reflects the interior of the American Indian artist's mind, is alive with pleasure, anxiety, movement, and meaning.

Anishinaabe writer and theorist Gerald Vizenor wrote that Curtis's images seem like an attempt to record American Indians at the moment before they were conquered and colonized. But those black-and-white photographs also were an attempt to erase those people and cultures, according to Vizenor.  The images trap those people in the past and deny their presence in modern American society. The past they are trapped in is ultimately not their own but the imagined past of the dominant culture of the United States. Images such as Curtis's became popular souvenirs of American history and mythology. Vizenor described them as "a cultural concoction of bourgeois nostalgia and social sciences evidence."

Images such as Big Bear's refuse to be trapped in that nostalgia. They are alive in the present. An image such as Spirit Warrior on Horse remembers a past before conquest, but it is not trapped in that past. It embraces the styles of Cubism, introduced long after the Indian Wars had ended. American Indian artists continue to evolve and explore new expressions, just as they always have. Big Bear's work is a testimony to that.

And his work just looks so darned cool.

I was introduced to Big Bear's work recently at the Native American Literature Symposium in Albuquerque, N.M. It is an annual gathering of people who study, teach, and/or create fiction, non-fiction, poetry, film, and art from Indian Country.  Big Bear's work was part of a presentation by Heid Erdrich, a terrific poet who has turned her talents to curating the work of American Indian artists.  You can see more artwork at the All My Relations Arts website. [A nice video about Big Bear can be seen here.]

Dances with Pez Dispensers

Dreamcatchers.  Wolves on t-shirts.  Broad-shouldered men and women with their arms outstretched to the moon or a mountain or an eagle.

American Indian art, right?

Powwow purchases perhaps.  Or examples of things you can buy at souvenir stands along I-40 through New Mexico and Arizona.  Decorations for a dorm room, maybe.

Fortunately, contemporary American Indian art is so much more exciting and challenging and funny than that. 

For instance, look at a work by Todd Bordeaux.  This display is called Reservation Diabetes Dispensers.

Reservation Diabetes Dispensers

Three dispensers of Pez (now Rez) candies that were distributed for different holidays -- Halloween (the closest to the camera), Easter (a bunny) and Christmas (Santa Claus).

It looks rather low-brow and comical -- and it is.  But it is postmodern and serious at the same time.  It is what we might call Pop Art or Neo-Pop Art. 

Both types of art can simultaneously celebrate and criticize consumerism and advertising.  In this case, despite the serious message that is conveyed by Reservation Diabetes Dispensers, the viewer is immediately drawn to the familiarity of the form.  Their fond memories of collecting the dispensers shape their initial reaction to the piece.  I bet nearly everyone smiles and laughs when they first see it.  The humor here is simultaneously innocent and dark.

Bordeaux's work also is an example of appropriation, where an object has been recycled or revised by an artist.  The everyday object is divorced from its original context.  This makes the viewer see it in a new light.  The work alienates the viewer from everyday objects they have taken for granted.  And it also raises questions about the nature of art.  Is it art simply because someone says it is?

Pop Art also comments on the ways art has been turned into a commodity.  This is done frequently by taking an actual commodity -- a Pez dispenser in this case -- and using it to make art.  Candy dispensers?  Art?  It is all for sale. 

But I see Bordeaux's display also commenting on the way American Indian arts and crafts have become commodities.  You can find this same beadwork on keychains and clothing and other items -- oftentimes at those I-40 souvenir stands.  His items indicate the way American Indian culture is often marketed to non-native audiences.

It also indicates the way non-native cultural practices are marketed to American Indians.  In this case, it is the way poverty and the lack of healthy food choices on many American Indian reservations have resulted in high rates of diabetes.  Nationally, more than 16 percent of the American Indian and Alaska Native population has diabetes, which is about twice the average for the entire United States population.  The rate can be as high as 33 percent among American Indians in the southwestern United States.

Bordeaux's choice of Pez dispensers also suggests the impact of colonization.  The Easter Bunny and Santa Claus evoke Christianity.  The arrival of Christianity to American Indians coincided with the arrival of other things, such as European diseases, devastating wars, coerced boarding school educations that worked to erase native languages, cultures, and religions.  The third dispenser, the one in the foreground, probably was not chosen because Halloween is so popular on American reservations; it probably was chosen because of its scary skull and its suggestion of death.

That is a lot to say with three candy dispensers!

I was introduced to this piece this past weekend at the Native American Literature Symposium in Albuquerque, N.M.  It is an annual gathering of people who study, teach, and/or create fiction, non-fiction, poetry, film, and art from Indian Country.  Bordeaux's work was part of a presentation by Heid Erdrich, a terrific poet who has turned her talents to curating the work of American Indian artists.  You can see more artwork at the All My Relations Arts website.  I will write soon about some of the other artists she discussed.